Robert Crais - Free Fall

I pushed her down again, then came up with the tall hitter’s shotgun just as the short hitter turned and fired two times. Both of his shots went wide to the right. I shot him in the face, and then I fired out through the double doors at the Monte Carlo and hit it, but then it was behind the fence and away and Floyd Riggens was shooting at me. I dove behind the little wall that shielded the entrance to the bathrooms.

There were more gunshots outside, and then Eric Dees was in the double doors, yelling, “Floyd, get your ass out here!” Outside, Pinkworth climbed into the blue sedan and ground it to life.

Riggens fired twice more at me, then went for the doors. Riggens’s eyes were wide and red and he looked like he was crying, but I wasn’t sure why. He stopped over Mark Thurman. Mark Thurman looked up at him, and Riggens said, “This is all your fault.” Then he raised his gun to fire. Jennifer Sheridan picked up Pete Garcia’s pistol and shot Floyd Riggens in the chest. The bullet kicked him back, but he kept his feet. He opened his mouth and looked down at himself and then he looked at Jennifer Sheridan and fell.

Outside, Warren Pinkworth put the blue sedan in gear and sped away. Eric Dees shouted, “You fuck,” fired two times at me, then dove behind the counter. Everything went still and quiet and stayed that way.

Pete Garcia rolled onto his side and moaned.

Jennifer Sheridan dropped Garcia’s gun, then grabbed Mark Thurman by the shirt and dragged him toward the rest rooms. He had to outweigh her by a hundred pounds, but she kicked off her shoes for better traction and made a sort of groaning sound and did what she had to do. The floor was gritty with shattered glass, but she seemed not to notice.

Gravel crunched outside the concession stand, and Joe Pike took a position behind the broken double doors.

I said, “That’s it, Dees. It fell apart. It’s over.”

Eric Dees moved behind the counter.

Pike looked in through the broken doors and I pointed at the counter. “Dees.”

Eric Dees moved behind the counter again.

Pike said, “Don’t be stupid, Eric. Let’s go home standing up.”

Dees said, “What else have I got, Joe?”

Eric Dees charged around the near end of the counter, firing as he came, and when he did, Joe Pike and I fired back.

Dees went down hard, and I ran forward and kicked his pistol away, and then it was over. Dees was on his back, blinking at the ceiling and clutching at his chest. Most of the pellets had taken him there. A dozen feet away, Pete Garcia said, “Oh, God,” but he didn’t say it to anyone in the room.

Pike came up beside me and looked down. “Hey, Eric.”

Eric Dees said, “Joe.”

Pike said, “There a radio in the unit?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll try to raise an ambulance.”

Pike went out to the green sedan.

Dees opened and closed his mouth and blinked up at the ceiling again. He said, “How’s Pete? Is Pete okay?”

I checked Pete Garcia and Floyd Riggens, and then I went to Mark Thurman. Jennifer Sheridan said, “He’s bleeding.”

The bullet had caught him low on the left side. She had ripped away part of her blouse and was using it to press on the wound. There was plenty of blood. Her hands were covered with it.

“Let me see.”

She pulled away the little compress and a steady rhythmic surge of blood pulsed from his abdomen. Artery.

He said, “I gotta stand up.”

She said, “You’ve got to stay down. You’re bleeding, Mark. I think it’s an artery.”

“I want to get up.” He pushed her off and flopped around and finally I helped him stand. When he was up he pushed me off and tried to walk. It was more of a sideways lurch, but he did okay.

Jennifer said, “Damn it, Mark, please. We have to wait for the ambulance.”

Mark Thurman stumbled sideways. I caught him and helped him stay up. He said, “You gotta help me.” He had lost a lot of blood.

Jennifer Sheridan said, “Make him lie down.”

“He’s okay.”

I helped Mark Thurman lurch across the concession stand to Eric Dees. Mark Thurman dug a slim billfold out of his back pocket, opened it, and held it out. It was his LAPD badge. He said, “Do you see this?”

“What in hell are you doing?” Little bubbles of blood came out of Dees’s nose when he said it and I wasn’t sure if he was seeing the badge or not.

Mark Thurman breathed hard and sort of wobbled to the side but he kept his feet. His shirt and his pants were wet with his own blood. He said, “I’m doing something that I should’ve done a long time ago, you sonofabitch. I am an LAPD officer, and I am placing you under arrest. You are under arrest for murder, and conspiracy to commit murder, and because you’re a lousy goddamned officer.” Then Mark Thurman fainted.

Eric Dees was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

Jennifer Sheridan rode in the back of the ambulance when they brought Mark Thurman and Pete Garcia to the Lancaster City Hospital. Pike and I followed behind in Mark Thurman’s Mustang.

The Lancaster cops assumed that something bad had gone down between a group of gangbangers and a group of LAPD officers, and neither Joe nor I told them different. The Lancaster police, as might be expected, assumed that the police officers on the scene had been there as the representatives of Truth and Justice. We didn’t tell them different about that, either. Joe Pike got one of the Lancaster cops to give him a lift back to his Jeep.

The emergency room staff tried to keep Jennifer Sheridan out of the ER, but Mark Thurman woke up enough to say that he wanted her with him, and they relented. I went with him, too. Because of the nature of the bleeding, the ER staff prepared to take Mark Thurman into the operating room. One of the doctors grumbled about having no X rays, but I guess nobody wanted to wait. Pete Garcia was already on the table, and it didn’t look good for him.

Jennifer and I stood beside Mark in a green tile hallway and waited for the orderlies to wheel him into the OR. Jennifer held his hand. Mark Thurman smiled at her, then his eyes moved to me. It was a sleepy smile. They had pumped him full of Demerol. “What do you think will happen now?”

I made a little shrug. “It’ll come out. No way to keep it in.”

Mark looked lost and maybe a little fretful. “The tape’s gone. There’s no more proof of what happened that night. They catch Pinkworth, all he’s going to do is deny everything. Akeem D’Muere isn’t going to offer anything.”

“There’s Garcia.”

Mark Thurman sighed. “If he makes it.”

“There’s me and there’s Pike.”

“Yeah. But that’s just words. You weren’t there that night.”

“No. But we’ll offer what we can. If no one believes, then there it is.”

A nurse came and told Mark that it would be just a minute more.

I said, “What do you want to do, Mark?”

He looked at Jennifer, and she nodded, and then he looked at me. “I don’t care about the tape. I want to go forward. I want to tell them what happened to Charles Lewis Washington. Can you set that up?”

I patted his shoulder and the orderlies came and took him away.

Jennifer Sheridan and I went into the little waiting room they have there and I bought her a cup of coffee. Then I went to the pay phone and called Lou Poitras. It was eighteen minutes after six, and he wasn’t happy to hear from me. “You’re late. I got half a dozen people sitting here waiting for you and your boy Thurman. You getting cold feet?”

“The tape’s gone, Lou. Dees burned it.”

Lou Poitras put me on hold. A couple of minutes later he picked up again. “I had to change phones. I didn’t want those people to see me have an aneurism.”